Chapter 4 — <br/> CHAPTER IV<br/>

The sun rose upon a tranquil world, and beamed down upon the peaceful
village like a benediction. Breakfast over, Aunt Polly had family worship:
it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of
Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality;
and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic
Law, as from Sinai.

Then Tom girded up his loins, so to speak, and went to work to “get
his verses.” Sid had learned his lesson days before. Tom bent all
his energies to the memorizing of five verses, and he chose part of the
Sermon on the Mount, because he could find no verses that were shorter. At
the end of half an hour Tom had a vague general idea of his lesson, but no
more, for his mind was traversing the whole field of human thought, and
his hands were busy with distracting recreations. Mary took his book to
hear him recite, and he tried to find his way through the fog: